There can be some confusion and misunderstanding about what exactly meditation is and what someone is doing when they are meditating.
It might be useful to examine what it is not before we focus on what it is.
Meditation is not thinking with your eyes closed.
If that is what happens for you – it isn’t that you are doing it wrong – I was trained to understand the mind thinks the same way the heart naturally beats. It’s part of its function.
Rather, the purpose of meditation is to detach from those thoughts. How you do that is up to the techniques that have been learned and practised. However, the purpose of meditation is not to get caught up in your thoughts – it is to empty the mind of thoughts.
Naturally, as the mind thinks, it might be that we temporarily get caught up in those thought patterns. However, the discipline when meditation is to let those thoughts go and not get caught up in them. As mentioned earlier my watchwords – which I took from Michael Singer‘s book The Untethered Soul is to “witness, acknowledge and let go” of thoughts.
Meditation is about working on being fully present.
We spend so much of our daily lives doing things. Whether that is at work or with our families – usually completing one task after another.
We consequently can experience this cult of ‘busyness’ where we move from one task straight to another and feel that being busy shows how important or useful we are. We fill the time and space with action.
The resultant activity can, for some people, lead to overstimulation – where it can become difficult to switch off and relax.
It may even be tempting to consume some substance as an indication that the ‘doing’ part of the day is over, and it’s time to chill. That routine can turn into a ritual. Rituals can turn into dependencies.
Some things help to activate the parasympathetic nervous system and enable a relaxed, safe, calm sensation. Certain substances produce these sensations predictably and reliably. That can be pretty attractive for personalities unable to create those sensations internally.
Conditions like ADHD and hyperarousal can be considered a part of this condition of always being ‘switched on’. The nervous system can be in a state of permanent arousal and stimulation. It could also be that certain body organs exhibit a high-stress level, setting those organs on high alert and affecting the way they function. For example, people might experience high blood pressure – indicating their heart is beating at an elevated rate.
None of these ideas are meant in any way to suggest that someone is consciously or deliberately doing something to harm themselves. Rather, that we can potentially dramatically improve our chronic health issues with mindfulness and imaginative play using internal strategies.
The aims and objectives of meditation.
Part of the process of meditation can be to start coming into conscious contact and awareness with the whole self, organs included, which means reconnection, imaginatively, with the body as an organ. Your organ to express yourself on the physical plane we exist on.
There’s a particular scene in Men In Black, which I saw over 20 years ago, and was struck by the simple but beautifully conceptualized idea encapsulated in this particular bit of the film.
The officers are examining this dead male, body lying in the morgue. As they examine the face of the corpse they notice this lever under one ear, which, when pushed, opens to reveals a small alien controlling numerous levers inside the skull of the head, managing all aspects of the ‘person’.
Arguably, this is what it is like to be a human. Meditation enables at least a start of the awareness of these levers. Eventually, a goal might be that mediation enables some level of control and/or influence in working those levers.
Firstly, though, to know how to start managing them, one first has to become aware of their presence. The overstimulation of the external world can drown out the self-awareness of the subtleties and revelations of the internal world, the levers. Meditation can act as a counterweight to that tendency.
Meditation can also be a counterforce to that drive to be constantly doing. Constantly busy, constantly active.
This quote from Abraham Hicks captures this idea
“You’ve got to have a willingness to think no thoughts. A willingness to carve out time to do nothing. A worthiness to not need to be productive. A worthiness to just be. A worthiness to just allow Source to wrap around you. A worthiness to just be. A willingness to not need to be active. A willingness to not need to do anything. A willingness to just sit in the ease. A willingness to just let Source wrap around you and through you. A willingness to just wait until there’s an impulse and a willingness to be alright if there isn’t one. A willingness to let it be what it bees without any control over it. Without trying to make it something. Without trying to understand it. Just let it be. Let it just be this silent space where there’s nothing for you to do. Nothing that needs to be done. Nothing that should be done. Nothing that hasn’t been done. Nothing that should have been done better. Just a willingness to just sit there and be. Just set there and be.”
